Just a quick observation: Among the many amusing phenomena in contemporary American politics is the rise of Senator Elizabeth Warren, Populist Heroine. That’s Elizabeth Warren the multimillionaire, Harvard elitist, affirmative action beneficiary…

Yes, yes, I know, FDR was a rich elitist too, and he successfully posed as a champion of the little guy. But FDR had (as Oliver Wendell Holmes is supposed to have put it) a first-class temperament. One can hardly say that of the shrewish Warren, who reminds me of nothing so much as a female version of the Original Elitist, Woodrow Wilson.

Posted by tmg110 at 4:26 PM EDT

Updated: Thursday, 21 August 2014 4:27 PM EDT

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In 2010 the Republican Party blew its chance to regain control of the US Senate. A lineup of subpar candidates—Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, Sharron Angle in Nevada, etc.—snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in a very good year for Republicans. And Democrats had their fingers crossed this year, hoping that the influence of Tea Party crazies would once more crush the GOP’s Senate hopes. 

No such luck. 

In the key states where control of the Senate will be determined, Republican primaries produced candidates favored by the party establishment, i.e. candidates unlikely to commit the tyro blunders that some Tea Party-backed candidates committed in 2010. Nor did the Tea Party succeed in unseating any of the incumbent Republican senators up for reelection this year. A net six seats must flip from the Democrats to the Republicans for the latter to win a Senate majority and that goal now seems well within reach. 

Democrats, on the other hand, have been hit with a series of setbacks. Earlier this month the campaign of Montana Democratic Senator John Walsh collapsed over charges of plagiarism, crushing the last fleeting hope that the party might retain control of the Senate seat held for 35 years by Max Baucus, who resigned after being nominated as ambassador to China by President Obama. Montana Governor Steve Bullock Walsh had named Walsh, the lieutenant governor, to serve out the brief remainder of Baucus’s term. Until felled by scandal, Walsh was running hard for election in his own right. His replacement for the 2014 election is a little-known state representative, Amanda Curtis. 

Meanwhile, in Louisiana, Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu, her reelection already in doubt, has been staggered with accusations of improper use of taxpayer dollars to fund campaign travel. The Louisiana Senate race had been rated as tough but winnable for the Dems, so Landrieu’s travails come as very unwelcome news indeed. 

The Democratic Party’s Senate prospects are further compromised—perhaps fatally—by Barack Obama’s plunging popularity. Gone are the golden days of the 2008 campaign and the first two years of his tenure. Aloof, out of touch, seemingly bored with his job, the President casts a cloud of gloom over the landscape of Democratic Party politics. With an approval rating in the vicinity of 40%, he’s a millstone around the neck of every Democratic candidate in a competitive race. Whoever would have thought that Barack H. Obama would turn out to be the Democrat’s George W. Bush? 

For Democrats, the 2014 outlook is grim. They could always play for a miracle, I suppose, and at this point they’d be well advised to get down on their knees…

Posted by tmg110 at 9:20 AM EDT

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We actually don’t know much about what happened between the late Michael Brown and Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson. That Wilson shot Brown is not in dispute. That Wilson executed Brown, or that he was defending himself against a violent assault by Brown, are speculative claims. That Brown was not shot in the back as some witnesses have claimed is suggestive—but of what? Though this tends to support Officer Wilson’s account of the fatal encounter, it certainly does not exonerate him. The facts of the case remain to be determined.

But the facts have become irrelevant.  Like the Trayvon Martin shooting, the killing of Michael Brown has become a cause célèbre, emblematic of issues ranging from white racism to the militarization of the police. The latter, indeed, has been much commented upon, though not in connection with the incident itself. It was the community’s reaction to the shooting and the police response to disorder in the streets that got people wringing their hands over police militarization. I find this peculiar. Clearly, the police should be properly equipped and trained to deal with civil unrest. That riot gear makes cops look more military in no way proves that a particular police department has evolved into a paramilitary gendarmerie. And in fact, despite all the moaning about police militarization I have seen no tanks, armored fighting vehicles, machine guns or grenade launchers deployed on the streets of Ferguson. A Hummer with light armor to protect against rocks, bricks, Molotov cocktails, etc. seems to me to be a good investment for any police department likely to be faced with violent demonstrations and riots. Though police militarization is a worrying trend in America, to be sure—why does the Department of Agriculture need a SWAT team?—it has nothing to do with the crisis in Ferguson.

The real problem in Ferguson, Missouri is the loud and raucous demand for the Queen of Heart’s justice: sentence first, verdict second. Michael Brown was black; Officer Darren Wilson is white. Therefore Wilson is guilty: first of racism and then of murder. And if the facts demonstrate otherwise, then the facts must be changed or disregarded. It’s a situation that both Lewis Carroll and George Orwell would have understood.

I don’t doubt that relations between the largely white Ferguson police department and the mostly black community are bad. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that many officers regard the people they’re supposed to protect and serve with fear and dislike. You can call this racism but mostly it’s situational racism: the kind that makes you and me cross the street to avoid a group of young black men. But a police officer can’t cross the street. We pay him to deal with the Michael Browns of the world. Then when the inevitable happens we strike an indignant pose. And many of us close our eyes to the evil attendant on such incidents: the cry for revolutionary justice.

It isn’t that Darren Wilson is going to be dragged into the street and hacked to death. He’ll get his day in court and if the facts of the case are as he related them he’ll be cleared of criminal wrongdoing. No, the problem is that the blood lust of the mob—and that’s what it is, make no mistake—will not be sated, even if Eric Holder manages to convict Darren Wilson of some civil-rights violation. That which the mob wants—his head on a pike, the Queen of Heart’s topsy-turvy justice—it will not receive. Give us Wilson’s head on a pike, the people say, and there will be peace. Which is another way of saying that peace in Ferguson and elsewhere in urban America where similar conditions obtain is a long way off.

Posted by tmg110 at 9:02 AM EDT

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According to Rob Reiner: “You can’t negotiate with that, you have to say either Hamas goes away and the Palestinian authority takes over all that region and deal with some kind of honest broker here, and create the two-state solution. Anytime you’re dealing with an extreme group, you cannot negotiate with them, and the way to do it is to eliminate it. With the Tea Party, you have to go through political thing, you have to wait till 2020 to redistrict, but that is really tough stuff.”

Yes, Rob, it' such a pity that you have to go through that annoying political thing.  If only you could get President Obama to call in a few drone strikes on those extremist Tea Party demonstrations…

What a moron. 

Posted by tmg110 at 5:50 PM EDT

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So Barack Obama has returned to Iraq—reluctantly, sullenly, whining and crying every step of the way. He thought he'd shaken the dust of the place off his wingtips, he didn't want to go back, but this is what happens when you tout a craven and dishonorable bolt for the exit as a magnificent foreign policy triumph.

The Greatest President Absolutely Ever wasn't content to slither out of Iraq. No, he had to send forth his veep, the comical Joe Biden, to assure the American people that Iraq would be the Obama Administration's greatest foreign policy success story! And that's why Barry's back with drones, pinprick airstrikes and military "evaluators." He didn't tell the truth about what he was doing in 2011 when all US forces were summarily withdrawn from Iraq: that America was abandoning that country to a grisly fate. So now he's doing his always-inadequate best to moderate the catastrophe that he did so much to create. If the cost in terms of human life and suffering wasn't so high, I'd be rolling on the floor laughing at Obama's utter incompetence. A name picked at random from the phone book could do the job better.

Posted by tmg110 at 5:41 PM EDT

Updated: Monday, 18 August 2014 5:53 PM EDT

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The idea that Hamas, an Islamofascist terrorist organization, is capable of attracting support from American feminists may seem incredible. After all, its attitude toward equal rights for women is…not very enlightened. But let us not forget that American feminism = progressivism = hatred of Israel. So it's no surprise to find an American feminist vomiting up such rhetoric as this:

I mourn genocide in Gaza because I am the granddaughter of a family half wiped out in a holocaust and I know genocide when I see it. People are asking why I am taking this ‘side’. There are no sides. I mourn all victims. But every law of war and international law is being broken in the targeting of civilians in Gaza. I stand with the people of Gaza exactly because things might have turned out differently if more people had stood with the Jews in Germany. I stand with the people of Gaza because no one stood with us. I went to synagogue last Friday night and had to leave because I kept waiting for the massacre of Gaza to be addressed. … Nothing. Where is god? God is only ever where we stand with our neighbor in trouble and against injustice. I turn in my card of faith as of now because of our overwhelming silence as Jews…I don’t mean Israelis, a separate issue…about the genocide now in Gaza.

Also sprach the inimitable Naomi Wolf. Now you may say that a woman capable of writing the biography of her own vagina is a woman capable of any intellectual or moral outrage. But let's face it, this nonsense of hers well reflects the views of enlightened progressives. Which is to say that they don't blink at an obscenity: comparing the Holocaust, the deliberate mass murder of some six million human beings, to the current Gaza crisis. And Wolf herself is a Jew! Very obviously, for all her hand-wringing moral outrage, she has never come to terms with one of the great crimes of the late century. But how useful her idiocy is to Hamas, and how its leaders must be high-fiving one another at this and similar examples of enlightened foolery.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:08 AM EDT

Updated: Monday, 11 August 2014 8:28 AM EDT

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Is Obamacare really a good idea? Who knows?

There’s not one single individual person in America, the world or this quadrant of the Galaxy who understands the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act. Barack Obama doesn’t understand it, nor does anybody in his administration, nor does anybody in Congress, academia or the media. There are some people who will tell you that they understand it, but such people are either lying to you or to themselves. Now this may strike you as a provocative statement, barfed out by an Obama opponent (me) who’s just trying to get a rise out of the President’s adorers. But it isn’t. I’m stating no more than the truth.

The original ACA legislation ran to 2,800 pages and most members of Congress—both those who supported and those who opposed it—didn’t read the whole thing. What was the point? As then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi explained, the only way to find out what was in the bill was to pass it. So congressional Democrats did pass it—but even so we’re none the wiser. How could that be?

By the end of 2013, the regulations required to implement Obamacare already ran to more than 10,000 small-print pages. Think about that. Is it plausible—is it even possible—that somewhere in the bowels of the federal bureaucracy there exists an oracle who understands how those 2,800 pages of legislation and 10,000+ pages of regulations work together to protect patients and make healthcare more affordable? Of course not. Even before the first regulation was promulgated, the length and complexity of the ACA was such that no one really understood how it would work in practice. Practically from day one the Obama Administration found itself issuing waivers, making exceptions and reinterpreting legislative language in a desperate attempt to keep the whole thing from collapsing under the weight of its own complications. Policy wonks tend to be contemptuous of the Law of Unintended Consequences. But their very desire to nail everything down, to cover all the bases, to address every possible situation, drives them to pile complications upon elaborations upon contingencies. And it is in this tangled labyrinth of wonkiness that the Law of Unintended Consequences does it most destructive work.

In 2009, uberwonk Ezra Klein, then with the Washington Post, opined that it was “silly” for members of Congress to read the ACA before passing it. They could never understand it, he sniffed, and neither could the public. The implication was, of course, that Ezra Klein, with his deep understanding of the legislative process and deep-dyed wonkiness did understand it. Therefore America: Don’t worry! Be happy!

But of course we can see now that Ezra Klein and his tribe no more understand Obamacare than they do particle physics. Neither do I. And neither do you. We’ll all just have to live with Obamacare to find out how it works—or doesn’t work. Now I ask you, is this any way to reform American healthcare?

Posted by tmg110 at 10:44 AM EDT

Updated: Sunday, 3 August 2014 10:14 AM EDT

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Whatever you think of the Gaza crisis, it’s hard to summon up much sympathy for the bone-headed US Secretary of State, John Kerry. His misbegotten push for a two-state peace deal between the Palestinians and Israel set the table for the current conflict. And his frenetic attempts to broker a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel have had the ludicrous effect of making the US appear more supportive of Hamas than many Arab countries—this despite the fact that the US government classifies Hamas as a terrorist organization.

Kerry painted himself into this corner after Israel accepted and Hamas rejected an Egyptian ceasefire proposal. Egypt’s new military-dominated government is no great friend of the Gaza terror group, which it regards as a close cousin of the now-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. So when Hamas brushed off Cairo’s proposed ceasefire, the Egyptians opted to sit back and let the fighting rage. After all, Israel in Gaza was dealing a heavy blow to Islamism, that amalgam of religious fundamentalism and quasi-fascist political ideology that Egypt and most of the other conservative Arab states view with fear and revulsion. So if Hamas was unwilling to take the deal that Cairo had put together, then Hamas—and the Palestinian residents in Gaza—would just have to take the consequences.

Well, that didn’t suit John Kerry, and he immediately turned to two of Hamas’ backers, Turkey and Qatar, who were more than happy to craft a ceasefire plan that met all the demands of Hamas but was certain to be rejected by Israel. And so it was, to the accompaniment of a barrage of criticism from the Israeli press and government officials. For while Kerry was wheeling and dealing, the IDF in Gaza was uncovering evidence of Hamas plans for a large-scale terrorist incursion into Israel via a system of tunnels whose scope and sophistication came as a severe shock to the Israeli government and public. The discovery of the tunnel system hardened Israel’s determination to finish the fight in Gaza, stripping Hamas of its military capabilities once and for all. Yet here was the United States Secretary of State, the chief diplomatic representative of Israel’s close ally, pushing hard for a Hamas-friendly ceasefire!

It was an embarrassing moment for the US government, as the tone of subsequent statements in support of the Secretary so clearly showed. Various officials fumed about the unkind things that had been said about Kerry in Israel, whining that “allies and partners” don’t treat one another in such a mean and hurtful manner. All of a sudden it seemed that the Gaza crisis was all about John Kerry's hurt feelings! Apparently his ham-handed incompetence is accompanied by an overweening sense of self-regard and the thin skin of a beleaguered adolescent—not exactly the ideal personality type for a diplomat. Come to think of it, though, a guy like that is really the perfect secretary of state for the jumped-up president of the senior class for whom he works.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:51 AM EDT

Updated: Thursday, 31 July 2014 12:25 PM EDT

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Now that the presidency of Barack Obama can be seen to have failed, the question becomes urgent: Why did Americans elect him in the first place? Specifically why did so many people on the progressive side of the political spectrum allow themselves to be taken in by his soaring but rather low-calorie 2008 campaign rhetoric? You know the kind of thing: “We are the change we’ve been waiting for,” etc. How is it that the best and brightest among the self-described reality-based party failed to discern what was obvious from the start to a rube like Rush Limbaugh?

If you get in the Wayback Machine and return to 2008-09, you’ll find many embarrassingly craven examples of Obama worship, and not just from his starry-eyed campaign claque. There’s the example of New York Times columnist David Brooks, who gushed over his first meeting with The One: “I remember distinctly an image of—we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” There’s the truly weird example of CNN anchor/reporter Foreman, who started writing letters to Obama during President’s first term. He wrote one every day and the final tally was 1,460 letters totaling more than half a million words. From Tinseltown, we got this from Susan Sarandon: “He is a community organizer like Jesus was. And now, we're a community and he can organize us.” And from overseas a December 2009 editorial in the Danish newspaper Politiken agreed with Ms. Sarandon. Because, you know, Barry too evolved from humble origins into a defender of the weak and vulnerable, albeit without the annoying religious b.s.

What was going on? What the hell was going on?

One explanation frequently advanced for the outpouring of intemperate Obama worship was the candidate’s race. And this was true as far as it went. But Obama wasn’t just black. He was something more: the Acceptable Black Man for whom white progressives had long been waiting.

Sure, other blacks have run for president, the Rev. Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton among them. But how could white progressives in the media, in academia or in the Democratic Party take such candidacies seriously? It wasn’t just that Jackson and Sharpton were seen as special pleaders, overly identified with one group of Americans. No, what really disbarred them from serious consideration in the minds of progressive establishment types was simple snobbery. With their flashy suits, histrionic rhetoric and camera-hogging habits Jackson and Sharpton seemed, well, tacky. Over the top. Lacking in class.

Then came Barack H. Obama.

Here was a black candidate with the qualities for which white liberals had been pining. Obama is a thoroughly atypical African American. He was born in Hawaii. He has lived in Indonesia. His father is a Kenyan and his mother is white. Himself aware that these anomalies set him apart, Obama made a conscious effort as a young man to connect with the African American mainstream, a quest that led him into the flock of the Rev. Jeremiah White. But his education and upbringing nevertheless fashioned him into a person with whom white progressives could easily identify. Disregarding his skin color, Obama is one of them. Their education, ideas, beliefs, opinions and habits of thought are his as well. He speaks their language. He makes them feel comfortable. He is the Acceptable Black Man.

It’s easy to understand why black Americans thrilled to Obama’s candidacy and election. Simply on the basis of his skin color, they identified with him. What could be more natural? But whether Obama has ever truly identified with them is a doubtful question. As president, he has paid no particular attention to the many problems of black America. On the other hand, he has been most solicitous of the desires of the progressive establishment. Ideologically he resembles Elizabeth Warren, not Jessie Jackson.

White progressives saw this in Barack Obama and it explains their worshipful attitude toward him in the salad days of his political career. That he was black was exciting and convenient—but that he seemed truly one of them clinched the deal. Their relationship with him, a form of self-love, has been one of the most amusing episodes in American political history.

Posted by tmg110 at 9:34 AM EDT

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Rep. Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinios, is really, really concerned about income inequality. To that end she has taken up “the minimum wage challenge,” pledging to spend a week or two eating what the downtrodden proles of America eat. No doubt in an effort to maximize our terror and pity, she released the Spartan menu on which she intends to subsist. Some excerpts: 

Breakfast: English muffin, one egg

Lunch: Chicken salad sandwich

Dinner: Pasta with tomato sauce, salad

Wow! This stands in sharp contrast to what I suppose her usual daily menu must list: 

Breakfast: Eggs Benedict, glass of Madeira

Lunch: Dover sole poached in white wine, fresh green beans, half-bottle of white Burgundy

Dinner: Lobster cocktail, Porterhouse steak, sauté potatoes, Caesar salad, bottle of Bordeaux, cheesecake, glass of Port

It’s almost as if these clueless congressional elitists are another species, only distantly related to us good old Homo Sapiens. Duh, Jan. Just duh…

Posted by tmg110 at 4:13 PM EDT

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